Archive for the ‘Ionia Manufacturing’ tag

While a one-off fiberglass-bodied Dodge concept car took center stage at last week’s Mitchell Car Museum liquidation sale, the core of the auction was made up of the station wagons that Don Mitchell – “Michigan’s station wagon king” – produced, including the 1958 Oldsmobile Super 88 Fiesta that sold for $77,000.

Assembled by William F. Mitchell in the 1990s to pay tribute to the many accomplishments of his father, Don Mitchell (as well as another relative who founded the Mitchell Car Company in Racine, Wisconsin), the Mitchell Car Museum in Owosso, Michigan, understandably included about a dozen station wagons among its 30 or so vehicles and uncompleted bodies. Yet when William Mitchell died in April at the age of 87, the rest of the Mitchell family decided that the costs of running the museum outweighed its benefits, prompting the auction this past Wednesday.

Like all of the station wagons and station wagon bodies at the sale, the Oldsmobile Super 88 Fiesta four-door hardtop wagon might have been assembled by one of Detroit’s Big Three, but the body originated with Ionia Manufacturing, a company that Mitchell, a trained engineer, oversaw. Mitchell began offering station wagon bodies through Ionia and its related coachwork companies as early as 1938, starting with woodie station wagons before eventually offering all-steel wagons from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s.

The description for the Fiesta, one of 5,175 such hardtop wagons that Oldsmobile built that year (8,498, including the Dynamic 88 line), didn’t contain any provenance for the wagon – William Mitchell obtained cars for the museum from around the country – but noted that a 305hp 371-cu.in. Rocket V-8 with 38,500 miles powered it, and that it came equipped with power steering, power brakes, tinted glass, and an AM pushbutton radio.

The centerpiece of the auction, the 1954 Dodge Granada, typified Don Mitchell’s experiments with fiberglass as a body material. Sitting on a regular production Dodge chassis and powered by a 150-hp, 241-cu.in. Dodge Red Ram Hemi V-8, the concept car uses a one-piece body, an advancement over how other fiberglass production and concept cars of the day were assembled from multiple fiberglass pieces . The Granada topped the auction, selling for $228,800.

Among the other cars from the museum’s location, a 1948 Pontiac Streamliner Wagon and a 1949 Buick Roadmaster Wagon sold for $165,000 each; a 1904 Mitchell B2 Runabout sold for $137,500; a 1911 Mitchell Model T Touring sold for $110,000; a 1949 Buick Super Estate Wagon sold for $93,500; a 1919 Mitchell C Cab Truck sold for $88,000; a 1908 Mitchell Model I 5 Passenger Touring sold for $78,100; a 1953 Packard Caribbean Convertible sold for $71,500; a 1954 Dodge Coronet Sierra sold for $66,000; a 1950 Buick Roadmaster four-door Woodie Wagon and a 1953 Buick Roadmaster four-door Woodie Wagon sold for $55,000 each; a 1957 Continental MK II sold for $53,900; a 1951 Buick Roadmaster four-door Woodie Wagon sold for $48,400; a 1908 Mitchell Model H Runabout sold for $46,200; a 1919 Mitchell 3 Passenger Coupe sold for $44,000; a 1956 Continental MK II sold for $40,700; a 1963 Buick Invicta Wagon sold for $36,300; a 1962 Oldsmobile Dynamic 88 Fiesta four-door Wagon sold for $30,800; a 1955 Buick Special EST Wagon and a 1953 Kaiser Golden Dragon four-door sold for $28,600 each; a 1970 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow Saloon sold for $22,000; a 1917 Mitchell D 40 Jr five-Passenger Touring sold for $18,700; a 1961 MUTT M151 Truck sold for $14,300; a 1983 Cadillac Seville sold for $11,000; and a 1955 Willys Military Utility Vehicle sold for $6,325.

When Bill Mitchell scoured the country in the early 1990s to collect examples of every car his father, Don, had a hand in, he had a sizable task ahead of him. After all, Don Mitchell was behind Ionia Manufacturing and Mitchell-Bentley and built numerous woodies, station wagons, concept cars and prototypes for Detroit’s automakers from the 1930s through the 1960s. Bill accomplished his task, and now 20 years later his collection will head to auction.

William F. “Bill” Mitchell (no relation to GM design chief William L. “Bill” Mitchell), who died in April at the age of 87, had worked for his father since 1947 and took over the reins of the company in 1972, but it was his father who would ultimately be christened “Michigan’s station wagon king” for his successes building the wagon for all of Detroit’s Big Three. Don Mitchell, a body engineer by training, but a salesman by trade, worked for a handful of Michigan auto suppliers until forming his own engineering firm in 1932. Four years later, he stepped in to help turn around Ypsilanti Reed Furniture Company of Ionia, Michigan, which he would eventually reorganize in 1942 as Ionia Manufacturing, with himself as president of the company.

Under Mitchell’s guidance, Ionia began building wooden station wagon bodies for General Motors in 1938 and then again after World War II, starting with Chevrolet and Pontiac from 1946 through 1948, then Buick from 1949 through 1954. At the same time, Ionia supplied wood body components to Ford for the 1946-1947 Ford and Mercury Sportsman convertibles and to Chrysler for its 1946-1948 Town and Country models. Around 1951, Ionia’s designers even took a crack at what would become the M-151 MUTT, though production contracts for the light jeep would ultimately go to other manufacturers.

After Detroit’s automakers switched from wooden to metal station wagon bodies, Mitchell continued to supply automakers with station wagon bodies. In 1954, the company produced the Dodge Sierra’s four-door station wagon bodies by lengthening the factory-built two-door bodies; it then built all of Buick’s station wagon bodies from 1954 through 1964 and all of Oldsmobile’s station wagon bodies from 1957 through 1964.

“At that time he was the world’s largest independent producer of station wagon bodies,” said Don Nemets, caretaker of the Bill Mitchell collection. “At Ionia’s peak, it employed 20,000 people.”

Mitchell expanded Ionia in the mid-1950s by merging it with the Owosso Manufacturing Company and renaming it Mitchell-Bentley, which would go on to supply automotive trim, build at least most of the Continental Mark II bodies for Ford Motor Company, and experiment with fiberglass automobile bodies.

One of the more prominent of those experiments, the 1954 Dodge Granada concept car, came about due to Mitchell’s partial ownership in Creative Industries of Detroit. At about the same time that Chrysler had Briggs produce the Bill Robinson-designed Plymouth Belmont out of fiberglass components – similar to how steel-bodied cars are typically produced by welding together multiple steel panels – Dodge President Bill Newberg wanted a fiberglass concept car molded in a single unit. Chrysler design chief Virgil Exner credited Briggs with styling the concept car, but actual production of the Dodge Granada fell to Creative Industries, which placed it on a Dodge chassis and powered it with a 150-hp, 241-cu.in. Dodge Red Ram Hemi V-8.

After Mitchell-Bentley sold Ionia in 1964, Mitchell reorganized the company again as the Mitchell Corporation, supplying stampings, interiors, and trim. Don Mitchell died in 1972, and Bill Mitchell kept the company going until his death, though he had sold off the manufacturing portion of the company in the 1990s.

The collection he assembled in tribute to his father would go on to become the Mitchell Car Museum – located in a Mitchell-Bentley building in Owosso – and include plenty of Ionia-bodied station wagons, a couple of Continental Mark IIs, a MUTT or two, a Creative Industries-built fiberglass-bodied Packard-powered Mitchell Panther, a fiberglass-bodied 1964 Buick Wildcat, the restored Dodge Granada, and several Mitchell cars built from 1903 to 1923 in Racine, Wisconsin, by a distant family relative. Though rarely open to the public – Nemets said it was mostly for family and friends, open to the public only for charity events – Bill Mitchell still curated it more like a topical museum than like a warehoused collection.

While Bill Mitchell did sell a handful of cars from the museum before his death – most notably the fiberglass Wildcat and the Mitchell Panther – 27 vehicles and a few bodies remain and will sell at no reserve at auction next month. Troy Crowe, a spokesperson for Sheridan Auctions, which is handling the sale, said the Mitchell family chose not to continue to run the museum because of the costs associated with it. “So it’s just a matter of settling the estate now,” he said. Bidding for the Granada will start at $25,000, while bidding for the rest of the vehicles will start at $5,000.

The auction will take place August 20 just down the road from the museum (which is too small to accommodate an auction) at Baker College in Owosso. For more information, visit SheridanAuctionService.com.

Look closely at this 1964 Buick Wildcat. Closer still. You might see a few minor trim differences from a regular production Wildcat two-door hardtop, but nothing gives away the fact that nearly every panel you see on this car is fiberglass rather than steel. Doubt it? You’ll soon be able to see the car in person at the LeMay – America’s Car Museum.

Recently donated by LeMay steering committee member Paul Ianuario, the one-off fiberglass-bodied Wildcat originated from a suggestion by Don Mitchell, at the time the president of Ionia Manufacturing and its parent company, Mitchell-Bentley. Mitchell had for years supplied parts to Detroit automakers and had even built a number of all-fiberglass concept cars for Dodge and Packard in the mid-1950s, so when the company developed a new fiberglass manufacturing process in the early 1960s, Don Mitchell approached Ed Ragsdale, Buick’s general manager, to procure a car that Mitchell-Bentley could re-skin in fiberglass.

Appropriately, Ragsdale chose to sell Mitchell a Wildcat. According to Ianuario, Ragsdale chose that model because Buick had just introduced it a couple of years prior to much success, though he certainly couldn’t have overlooked the fact that the 1953 Wildcat and 1954 Wildcat II Motorama cars also used full fiberglass bodies. In fact, Buick claimed that it built the 1953 Wildcat show car specifically to test the feasibility of using the material in body construction.

1954 Buick Wildcat II show car. Photo courtesy GM Media.

Starting out as a typical 401-powered two-door hardtop, the Wildcat went straight from the Flint, Michigan, assembly plant to Mitchell-Bentley’s works in Owosso, Michigan, where Mitchell had his workers spend the next two months removing most of the exterior panels from the car, replicating them in fiberglass and reattaching them to the metal substructure of the car. They left only the roof, doors, trunk pan and presumably the floor pan in metal to provide structural stability, Ianuario said. “You look down the side of this car and it’s amazing how straight it is,” he said. “I guess the new technique was what gave those results.”

Because Mitchell wanted the Wildcat to impress Ragsdale and the folks at Buick and GM who were to evaluate the car, he had it loaded with just about every conceivable option, including cruise control, air conditioning, remote mirrors, power windows, power seats, power steering, power brakes, power antenna, and a tilt steering wheel. Buick and GM then evaluated the Wildcat for the better part of a year, in the process putting a couple thousand test miles on it. No records from that test period have yet surfaced, but Don Mitchell’s son, William, later told Ianuario that the fiberglass body panels saved a total of 800 pounds, which would put the Wildcat in the 3,200-pound range. “Whatever the weight, they significantly improved the power-to-weight ratio,” Ianuario said.

Photo courtesy LeMay – America’s Car Museum.

In 1964, however, Mitchell-Bentley sold Ionia Manufacturing – along with the company’s fiberglass research – to A.O. Smith. At about the same time, Don Mitchell retired, leaving his son William in charge of the reorganized Mitchell Corporation. Amid the corporate tumult, Buick never returned the Wildcat to Don Mitchell, whose name remained on the car’s title, and it later ended up in the collection of the Sloan Museum in Flint. As William Mitchell told Ianuario, it took the help of Chuck Jordan to return the car to the Mitchell family, who then kept it in a warehouse in Owosso for the next few decades.

Ianuario said that he first heard about a fabled all-fiberglass Buick sometime in the mid-1990s and dismissed it as a mere urban legend until 2004, when an acquaintance of his not only said he knew where the car was, but could set up an appointment to see it. About a month later, he bought it, still in the Mitchell family’s name, in almost exactly the same condition as when Mitchell delivered it to Buick. Just 3,983 miles are on the odometer today. It remained a part of Ianuario’s collection in Duncan, South Carolina, seen only by visitors, until Ianuario decided that it deserved to be in a museum. “I didn’t want to take a chance damaging it, because if I did, then how in the world would I repair it?” he said. “A car like that needs to be seen and appreciated for what it is.” Ianuario said that the museum plans to ship the car west later this month.

In addition to the Wildcat, the museum has also recently received another unique donation: the 1960 Rambler American station wagon dubbed Ferrambo, which won the Detroit Autorama’s Ridler Award in 2008. Built by Divers Street Rods in Sultan, Washington, for Mike Warn of Warn Industries, Ferrambo features a 405hp, 3.6-liter V-8 and six-speed transaxle from a wrecked 2002 Ferrari 360 Modena, mounted where the rear seats would normally be.

“Our collection is never static,” said David Madeira, the president of the LeMay Museum. “It’s constantly changing and evolving, which gives families and car enthusiasts a reason to come back.”

The LeMay claims that each of these cars is valued at $750,000. For more information on the LeMay, visit LeMayMuseum.org.